Yreka grad wins top award

Siskiyou County native and Yreka High School graduate Tina Smith is riding pretty high these days. She just returned from a Los Angeles awards ceremoney where she took first place in an international writing competition, but there's no time for her to rest on her laurels.

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By John Bowman

Siskiyou Daily News, Yreka, CA

By John Bowman

Posted May. 2, 2013 at 1:03 PM
Updated May 3, 2013 at 11:14 AM

By John Bowman

Posted May 2, 2013 at 1:03 PM
Updated May 3, 2013 at 11:14 AM

Chico

Siskiyou County native and Yreka High School graduate Tina Smith is riding pretty high these days. She just returned from a Los Angeles awards ceremoney where she took first place in an international writing competition, but there's no time for her to rest on her laurels.

Smith now lives with her husband and children in Chico. In July 2012, the Daily News reported that Smith had won first place in the quarter-final segment of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award. The quarter-final win netted her a $1,000 cash prize and put her in the running for the grand prize, which includes a $5,000 cash award.

At the awards ceremony in Los Angeles on April 14 – which she described as "pretty much like an Academy Awards for nerds" – she won that grand prize and made some very advantageous connections that have already begun to fuel the next stage of her writing career.

Smith's winning short story titled "Twelve Seconds" – written under her pen name, Tina Gower – is a science fiction tale "about a man with autism who archives the memories of murder victims. He is pulled into a mystery when he discovers a memory that is incomplete," she explained.

"I've struggled with writing my entire life," said Smith, who had to overcome dyslexia on her road to becoming a skilled author, "and when I set out to improve, I never would have imagined going this far. I'd started out with the small goal of sending out stories in hopes that one day – probably ten to twenty years into the future – I'd have at least one published."

But her hard work has paid off with relatively quick success. After finishing college and graduate school she took three years of writing courses. At the end of her long educational journey, the first story she sent out was bought and published by the non-fiction anthology Chicken Soup for the Soul. She says getting a work of fiction published took a little longer, though.

In a July 2012 interview, Smith said she had spent nearly five years attempting to get published as a fiction writer and was on the verge of giving up. After some reassurance from friends and family, she decided to try one last submission. That submission has catapulted her into a whole new realm.

Mike Resnik, a well respected science fiction/fantasy writer and editor was one of the judges in the Writers of the Future contest. After reading several of her short stories, he requested that Smith send him two novelettes (40-70 pages) the week before the competition.

"I had no idea what he wanted them for, but when someone with his reputation tells you to jump you ask 'how high,'" said Smith. She had one to submit but had to write one more in that short week.

Page 2 of 2 - As it turned out, Resnik loved the novelettes and made her an offer she couldn't refuse. "He offered me a project, to write a collaboration for the Stellar Guild series, which is a very prestigious line of novels where a new unknown writer is paired with a big-name veteran of the field. And he chose to work with me. So I'll be collaborating on a novel this summer with him," she said proudly.

Smith also had the pleasure of receiving compliments from several other well-known science fiction and fantasy writers at the awards ceremony.

She said, "It was truly an honor to have bestselling writers come up to me at the awards gala to tell me they loved my story – that I'd done something amazing. I just wanted to write a good story that would get published."

It seems that all the attention Smith has earned lately has motivated her to continue to strive for bigger and better things. "I'm continuing to write short stories and send them to markets," she explained, "but I'm focusing on writing at a higher quality. I'm also writing a second novel, I finished the first at the end of last year. My head has been spinning at all the good news lately. I got home from Writers of the Future with a published story, a grand prize, an offer to collaborate for the Stellar Guild and then I got a phone call that my novel – which I'd entered in a contest – is one of five finalists in the Daphne du Maurier Awards for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense in the paranormal category."

If that isn't enough, Smith has a new short story that was just published by Galaxy's Edge on May 1. That story can be accessed for free at www.galaxysedge.com/n4.htm.